Eric Schmidt is stepping down as Google's chief executive, the company announced on Thursday. Larry Page, Google's 37-year-old co-founder, will take the reins as CEO on April 4.
Schmidt, 55, made the announcement via Twitter, linking to a note with this quip: "Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!" He joined Google in 2001.
"As Google has grown, managing the business has become more complicated," Schmidt wrote in the note posted on Google's official blog. "So Larry, Sergey [Brin, Google's other co-founder] and I have been talking for a long time about how best to simplify our management structure and speed up decision making -- and over the holidays we decided now was the right moment to make some changes to the way we are structured.
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"For the last 10 years," Schmidt continued, "we have all been equally involved in making decisions. This triumvirate approach has real benefits in terms of shared wisdom, and we will continue to discuss the big decisions among the three of us. But we have also agreed to clarify our individual roles so there’s clear responsibility and accountability at the top of the company."
Schmidt added: "In my clear opinion, Larry is ready to lead and I'm excited about working with both him and Sergey for a long time to come."
Brin "will devote his energy to strategic projects," and product development, the company said, with the title "co-founder."
Schmidt's announcement coincided with Google's quarterly earnings report. The company reported revenues of $8.44 billion during the fourth quarter of 2010 -- an increase of 26 percent compared to the same period in 2009. Google earned a profit of $8.75 per share during the quarter, up 29 percent over the previous year.
"Our emerging businesses -- display, Android, YouTube and Chrome -- are on fire," Schmidt wrote. "As our results today show, the outlook is bright."
But his departure surprised some in the tech industry. “Larry stepping up to be CEO. is really surprising,” SearchEngineLand.com editor Danny Sullivan, told the New York Times. “[Page and Brin] hadn’t really shown that they wanted to be CEO.”
And while Google may have a stranglehold things like on search (sorry Bing) and Internet display advertising, the company faces competition from a new Silicon Valley giant, Facebook, and upstarts like Twitter in the white-hot social media space.
Read Schmidt's entire note here:
An update from the Chairman
1/20/2011 01:01:00 PM
When I joined Google in 2001 I never imagined -- even in my wildest dreams -- that we would get as far, as fast as we have today. Search has quite literally changed people’s lives -- increasing the collective sum of the world’s knowledge and revolutionizing advertising in the process.
